From an Italian dining room near the university to a grocery-store dressing.

Marzetti began as a restaurant. The Marzetti Company says Teresa Marzetti and her husband Joseph arrived in the United States from Florence, Italy, in 1896 and opened a small Italian restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The company’s history page adds that the couple worked for Joseph’s father, John Marzetti, whom it describes as an Italian real-estate developer, retail merchant and confectioner. English Wikipedia, in its article on the T. Marzetti Company, says the restaurant served mainly students of The Ohio State University; its article on the casserole Johnny Marzetti places the first dining room at Woodruff Avenue and High Street.

From 1911, the company says, Teresa ran the restaurant on her own. Wikipedia says she opened a second location on Gay Street in 1919 and closed the original University District site a few years later, and that in 1940 the business moved to 16 East Broad Street, across from the Ohio Statehouse — the address Wikipedia calls its most well-known location.

The dressings were what customers carried home. The company says the creamy coleslaw and French dressings were “the talk of the town” and that diners rarely left without bottles of their favourites; its anniversary story, published in 2026, says Teresa started bottling and selling the dressings in 1919. Wikipedia says the restaurant’s homemade dressings began to be sold by mail soon after the business was founded. Both sources credit a long-serving employee: the company’s story of Katherine Hill says she joined the restaurant in 1933 as a temporary dishwasher, moved into the kitchen, and was tested by being asked to create a creamy coleslaw dressing for the dining room. The company says customers liked her coleslaw dressing so much that they asked for bottles to take home, and that she went on to create dressings, sauces and breads for decades, finishing as a senior food technologist at the Marzetti research and development facility. Wikipedia credits Hill with the creation of the dressing line.

A family restaurant becomes a public company’s name.

The bottling outgrew the kitchen. Both the company and Wikipedia say that by 1955 the upstairs of the restaurant had become a full-scale dressing factory, and that the Marzetti brand of salad dressings soon reached grocery stores throughout Ohio. Wikipedia says that by the late 1960s the company had built a dressing plant on Indianola Avenue in the Columbus neighbourhood of Clintonville.

Ownership changed in 1969. The company’s history page says the Marzetti family decided to sell the business that year and that John B. “Bernie” Gerlach of Lancaster Colony helped acquire it; its anniversary story says simply that the family sold the business to Lancaster Colony Corporation in 1969. The company says the restaurant closed in 1972, while the dressing business carried on. Wikipedia describes the T. Marzetti Company as the specialty food group of Lancaster Colony, headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, and says production expanded to further plants in Columbus and to Horse Cave, Kentucky.

The restaurant’s name then climbed to the top of the corporate structure. The company’s 2026 anniversary story says that in 2025 Lancaster Colony was renamed The Marzetti Company “to honor Teresa’s legacy of flavor and quality”, and its history page now refers to “Lancaster Colony (now The Marzetti Company)”. The company’s site lists the brand alongside others it sells, including New York Bakery, Sister Schubert’s, Girard’s and Cardini’s, and it lists licensing partners whose restaurant names appear on its retail sauces and dressings, among them Chick-fil-A and Olive Garden. On 1 May 2026 the company announced that it had completed its acquisition of Bachan’s, Inc., the Sebastopol, California, maker of Bachan’s Japanese-style barbecue sauce.

Wikipedia records a story the company disputes. It says Teresa is sometimes credited with the Midwestern casserole Johnny Marzetti, supposedly named after her brother-in-law, but that the company and its historians have said they found no evidence for it, and that the dish does not appear on any menu in the corporate archives. Wikipedia adds that The Columbus Dispatch food editor Mary Pegg noted in 1963 that the dish was not connected to the Marzetti family or its restaurants.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American mayonnaise, salad-dressing and syrup names, the jars and bottles that sit in a refrigerator door or on a pantry shelf. Many began somewhere small and specific — a home kitchen, a restaurant dining room, a regional factory — before passing through larger food companies, and several are still loyally bought in one part of the country more than another.

Their identities are carried mostly by packaging rather than by advertising alone: the shape of a wide-mouthed jar or a squeeze bottle, a label colour that shoppers learn to spot from the end of an aisle, a script or serif name, and sometimes the memory of the restaurant or cook the product came from. Because owners change and recipes travel, the questions behind each name are worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A surname that moved from a menu to a label to a company.

The brand’s core asset is a person’s name. The company presents Marzetti as Teresa’s own surname carried from the restaurant door to the dressing bottle, and in 2026 it marked the brand’s anniversary, counting from the 1896 opening. Its anniversary story describes the retail range as refrigerated salad dressings and dips, naming Classic Ranch, Chunky Blue Cheese, Supreme Caesar and Sweet Italian, and says the foodservice side sells Marzetti sauces and dressings in formats for restaurant kitchens.

The company’s storytelling leans on the restaurant years. Its history page lists short videos on the people behind the brand — Teresa and her vision, the acquisition, and Katherine Hill — and its stories section returns repeatedly to the bottles customers carried out of the dining room. The 2025 corporate rename, which the company says was made to honour Teresa’s legacy, put the Marzetti name above the parent company’s other brands, including New York Bakery breads and Sister Schubert’s rolls.

For a design guide, Marzetti shows how a family restaurant’s name can outlast the restaurant itself and end up as the name of the company that bought it. Compare it with Hidden Valley, another dressing named after the place it was first served, and Bachan’s, the family-recipe sauce the company acquired in 2026. For this guide we use trattoria red and deep wine with basil green on coleslaw cream and a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Marzetti’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.